183: Woke Pope Cancels America's Bishop (w/Mike Lewis)
Conspiracy Theory Catholicism is back, bringing together Satanic Panickers, anti-vaxxers, tradwives who think (or at least say) birth control is an abomination, and survivalist prayer bros who string bullets into rosaries. This motley bunch agree on one thing: Pope Francis is just too damn woke.
The movement has many leaders, but only one man has been dubbed “America’s Bishop”: Joseph Edward Strickland, the now-former Bishop of Tyler, East Texas. “Former,” because on November 11, the Pope of Woke canceled him from his post.
Our guest today, Mike Lewis of the Catholic news and opinion website, wherepeteris.com, walks us through this strange tale, detailing how Strickland courted his own demise by going batshit on Twitter during the pandemic, suggesting Francis is a heretic, calling Joe Biden evil, and railing against abortion-derived vaccines.
Butcherbox Promo: Sign up today at butcherbox.com/conspirituality and use code conspirituality to get free chicken wings for a year.
Show Notes
Mel Gibson: The man without a pope - Where Peter Is
Americans, including Catholics, continue to have favorable views of Pope Francis
Many Americans — including most Republicans — believe the pope should stay out of U.S. affairs | YouGov
Searching for Answers: Why Was Bishop Joseph Strickland Removed?
QAnon Conspiracies Sway Faith Groups, Including 1 in 4 White Evangelicals | News & Reporting | Christianity Today
New poll: QAnon embraced by 11 percent of white Catholics and 15 percent of all Americans | America Magazine
Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ
Many Americans believe in the supernatural, UFOs | Ipsos
Pope Francis’ unexpected friendship with a group of trans women | America Magazine
The making of Bishop Strickland - Where Peter Is
Strickland's Adventurous Online Legacy - Mike Lewis Extra
Bishop Strickland's "Letter from a Friend"
Podcast: Fr. James Martin on Pope Francis and accompaniment - Where Peter Is
‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
So the Catholic Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas made a name for himself during the pandemic.
This dude went full anti-vax, started talking about the deep church, he became a holy shit poster on Twitter, and he implied that the Pope was a woke heretic.
Wow.
How did that work out for him?
Well, Francis has finally shit-canned him.
So we've got Catholic journalist and commentator Mike Lewis with us today to chart that strange
story and to tell us about how he believes Francis is fighting the good fight to stop
the Roman Catholic Church from becoming the Temple of Q.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And this week, we should add how sometimes the strongest resistance to the reactionary faction of a religion might come from within that same religion.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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And we've got a book out.
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It's in print, ebook, and audiobook format.
Conspirituality 183.
Woke Pope cancels America's Bishop with Mike Lewis.
1950s.
Bishop Fulton Sheen, in full regalia, shouts into the television camera about battling the evils of communism through the mystical body of Christ, which is, of course, the Roman Catholic Church.
1980s, Lawrence Pazder, the psychiatrist who really wanted to be a Catholic priest, ignites the modern global satanic panic by co-writing Michelle Remembers with his patient and future wife, Michelle Smith.
The moral of their fantasy was that the only thing that could save her and us from the cabal of satanic pedophiles running the world was the grace of the Virgin Mary.
2004.
Jim Caviezel, a devotee of that same Virgin Mary, gets struck by lightning on the set of Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Gibson, who is so incredibly Catholic, he believes every Pope since 1958 is a heretic.
And it seems the lightning left a QAnon-sized hole in Caviezel's brain to be filled in with internet garbage over a decade later.
And now, like a fever dream on repeat, conspiracy theory Catholicism is back, baby.
It's on the rise in the U.S.
again, and it's bringing together satanic panickers, anti-vaxxers, humorless scolds who think it all went wrong after Vatican II in the 1960s, when John XXIII told Catholics they didn't have to pray in Latin and they could bring their guitars to church.
There are trad wives who think, or at least they say, that birth control is an abomination.
And there's survivalist prayer bros who string bullets into rosaries.
Amy Coney Barrett sits on the Supreme Court.
And Steve Bannon spent half a term in the White House.
And he might be coming back.
Yeah, I mean, perhaps surprisingly to some of us, Bannon is very much involved in the 2024 campaign.
After his pardon, we should remember at the end of Trump's last run, even as he awaits a court date, which is scheduled two months after Trump, in front of the same New York judge.
I'll be covering some of this in our Saturday episode.
Now, in addition to being an insider on the failed coup of January 6th, Bannon has connections to reactionary Catholics, like Cardinal Burke, with whose support he tried and failed a couple years back to establish what he would refer to in interviews as a school for populist gladiators in an 800-year-old Italian monastery.
Burke, in fact, is part of the reactionary motley bunch.
I mean, a central piece to it, a central figure.
And there are a lot of differences between these characters, but they all agree on one thing, which is that Jorge Maria Bergoglio elected Pope Francis in 2013.
He's, you know, a rare non-European and he's the first Jesuit to hold the position.
It's just too damn woke.
He's having lunch with transgender sex workers every Wednesday.
He's asking Catholics to treat queer people with love and respect.
He's inviting Amazonian shamans to offer sacred plants to the altar at the Basilica after he apologizes for the horrors of religious colonialism.
Obviously, he's leading the church to hell.
Either that or he's the reincarnation of Jesus.
So this movement has many leaders vying for power on Twitter and the Fox News-like networks of reactionary broadcasters.
But only one man has been dubbed by this make-the-church-great-again crowd with the title, America's Bishop.
And that would be Joseph Edward Strickland, the now former Bishop of Tyler, East Texas.
The former, I say, because on November 11th, the Pope of Woke cancelled him from his post.
Now why did this happen?
Strickland is tall, handsome.
He's a distance runner.
He's affable with a kind of G-Shucks drawl.
And he's perfected that particularly Catholic skill of grandiose humility.
Every morning, he prays in front of the Blessed Sacrament for hours.
And he implies in interviews that he's in direct communication with Jesus.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, and it's winning.
He's winning.
They're going to get tired of winning in Tyler, Texas.
Maybe they were tired, and that's why he was canned.
The collection baskets were full.
Clean-cut young men from across his diocese were flocking to the seminary.
So in terms of numbers, he's a real winner in this period of church decline.
So what's not to love?
Well, the Vatican investigated Strickland in October, and in true deep church form, They haven't disclosed exactly why he was removed.
So, our expert guest today, Mike Lewis of the Catholic News and Opinion website wherepeteris.com, suggests that administrative concerns were central, but that also Strickland courted his own demise by going batshit on Twitter during the pandemic.
For instance, he retweeted a video that called the Pope a diabolically disoriented clown.
Not good.
He quoted a passage from Revelation to suggest that old Francis is the Antichrist.
And he challenged the instruction to accept queer people with unconditional love.
He called Joe Biden evil.
And he railed against abortion-derived vaccines and critical race theory.
I want to flag two things here, and I know you're going to get into this a little bit more in your discussion with Mike Lewis, which I really enjoyed, but on the topic of abortion-derived vaccines, that's a real conservative talking point, and it's mostly false.
Right.
I mean, I hate to say it, but even Ben Shapiro recently said that there's nothing we can do about vaccines developed from stem cell lines from aborted fetuses.
From decades ago, generations ago, so he advocated for using the medicine for good, which kind of befuddled his collar.
Wow.
He does take issue with any new lines being developed from aborted fetuses, which, you know what, if you're an anti-abortion activist, that's at least a coherent argument.
So I understand it on a logical basis.
But Strickland's argument seems to be in bad faith given that the vaccines he's talking about were obtained from aborted fetus lines in the 1960s.
Now, second point, I also want to note that we do talk about anti-vaxxers on this podcast a lot.
I know some people drowned it out at this point, but it's really, really important.
Just this past week, a federal judge in Mississippi sided with a medical freedom group, which is the anti-vaxxers' slick marketing term to try to appeal to a broader audience, and now 2,100 schoolchildren in the state are exempt from vaccination on religious grounds.
So you said, you know, Strickland is winning.
In a lot of districts, anti-vaxxers are winning right now.
So the Mississippi state health official says if that number reaches 3,000, formerly defeated diseases like polio are likely to make a comeback.
And Mississippi isn't alone.
Kindergarten vaccination exemption rates have nearly doubled in the last decade, and they've experienced a one-point growth each year for the last two years.
Now, what's happened in the last two years, obviously, this is how the fervor has kicked up a lot, and this doesn't bode well for children in the coming years.
Yeah, it's infuriating that hashtag save the children, you know, in this case is just about 50 year old fetal cells and not about actual living human beings.
Well, I think from a traditional Catholic perspective, there's got to be some kind of performative compensatory displacement stuff going on here with all of the sentimentality around children because they obviously haven't protected the children at all historically.
So, I imagine it feels pretty good to create a scenario, however fake, in which you're protecting the children from abuse.
So, Pope Francis is 83, and he's not long for the world.
He is so chronically ill with lung inflammation that on many days he can't actually speak.
I think he knows he's coming to the end.
And I think he's taking some firm actions with the time he has left, but it's taken him years to heed calls from U.S.
progressive Catholics to slap Strickland down, and maybe that's because there are a lot of risks.
U.S.
Catholics overwhelmingly approve of Francis, but the ranks of reactionaries are growing, and one thing that we can look at is that 11% of America's 72 million Catholics think that QAnon is real.
Now, that's less than the one in four evangelicals who are Q-pilled, but this Catholic faction, like Moms of Liberty or the right-wing nerds behind Project 2025, are super hungry, they're very well organized, they have
very slick news broadcast operations, and they're evangelizing really hard and they can organize
well-funded campaigns from within the financial and political influence of the church that
they seem to love to hate.
Yeah, I mean, I'm wondering here if it's accurate that you have these opponents of
a more liberal doctrine that see themselves as fighting the good fight from within the
Catholic Church rather than breaking off and doing whatever other kind of Protestant movement
they might do.
And Mike Lewis sees himself and the people that he supports as doing the same thing, just from the other side.
This is a battle within the church that is essentially along the lines of like, we want to stay within the church and save it for our particular ideological position.
We can decide about whether it feels like a fight from Lewis's side.
What I tend to hear from progressive Catholics are appeals to empathy and inclusion.
Reactionaries, I think, really fight when they think they're losing something, but when you listen to Lewis talk about the direction Francis has taken, there's no sense of tradition being lost, but rather a kind of tradition being developed.
Okay, so briefly I want to flag something you both will hear me discuss with Louis in the interview and everybody else will as well, and that's what it means for Strickland to make this show of public prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament.
Because I think this is at the heart of the self-righteous paranoia he inspires in his followers.
Now, for all the non-Catholics out there, I am humbly praying for you to understand that the Blessed Sacrament is a single wafer of blessed communion bread put on display in this super ornate, you know, kind of bowling trophy sized display case.
And it's put on the altar at various times during the day.
And people come to pray before it and venerate it.
There are, you know, oral group prayers.
There's a lot of silent devotion.
But they're not praying to a wafer of bread.
What they are praying to, it is said, is the body of Christ transubstantiated from bread during the highest point of the ritual mass, which is called consecration.
Do go on.
Among Catholics, the question is, who really believes in transubstantiation?
In 2019, Pew found that only one-third of Catholics truly buy it, with two-thirds thinking of it as being merely symbolic.
Now, you know, 39% of Americans told Ipsos in 2023 that they believe in ghosts.
So actually, more Americans on mass believe in ghosts than Catholics believe in transubstantiation, which they, you know, are sort of required to believe in, which tells you something about the state of Catholic belief.
And that's what reactionaries worry about.
30% or whatever of people who are still actually believers in transubstantiation is far worse than declining attendance numbers or empty seminaries because it means that Catholics are losing the capacity to fervently believe in the living presence of Jesus in the world.
Which seems to me to be a description of the Bitterly prosecute a tension that has always existed between fundamentalists and progressives at every stage of the schismatic process that repeatedly gives us new denominations and sects in all religious traditions.
I mean, there's always a group that wants to go back to a literalism in tight relationships then to politics and law that sees the world as a stage for the cosmic battle of supernatural forces.
And I think to me it's why church-state separation is so important, and why the reactionaries always want to erase it, because the more moderate, metaphorical, ecumenical, religious doctrine, the more it becomes that way, the less power it has.
And over time, it does seem to be, it's less compelling then for a lot of the flock.
We know that somebody like Steve Bannon, who is nominally Catholic or performatively Catholic, would love a theocratic state.
And maybe somebody like Strickland could be urged to go along with that after, you know, getting the word from Jesus in front of the Blessed Sacrament.
But in general, non-reactionary Catholics accept and appreciate something called positive secularism with roots that go back to the mid-19th century where the attitude is that the state and churches of various religions should maintain separation of function but also hold positive regard for each other, stay out of each other's way.
But with regard to the belief in transubstantiation, reactionaries watch those numbers fall with alarm because at some point, they believe if it gets low enough, Satan really is in control, meaning the world has become secularized.
And they blame that falling number not on their own cringiness or cruelty, not on their politics of exclusion.
They blame it on the woke agenda of Pope Francis.
So, when Strickland kneels down in public, Yeah, that's beautifully said, Matthew.
90 minutes at a time early in the morning, he's pushing that wafer up the mountain of belief
like Atlas in a red cape.
He's saying, I will never think of that bread as bread.
I will never think of this thing, this action as symbolic.
He's really displaying a fierce commitment to a kind of primal magic.
Yeah, that's beautifully said, Matthew.
I mean, I wonder if they may be right though, that the more a particular group of people
who belong to a religious denomination come to see the ideas, the beliefs
as being more metaphorical, the more they're gradually stepping away
from supernatural faith.
And for the reactionaries, if you don't have the literal belief, then the literal Satan is now in charge.
And, you know, I've often seen people do...
People like Alan Watts talk about, Joseph Campbell actually too would do this, talk about the Anglican Church as being, you know, just this incredibly milquetoast, like take it or leave it.
Nobody really cares what you believe.
It's much more a cultural institution than a religious one.
It doesn't really have influence over politics anymore.
You know, their concerns may be valid given their agenda, right?
Yeah, they might have reason to fear that a decline in literalism spells the end of, you know, the mystic church.
but I think they also, as they do that, they have to ignore or refuse to acknowledge
that the metaphor Catholics can stay in the church for generations and for reasons
that have nothing to do with magic.
♪ Matthew, when you brought this episode idea to us,
you know, it's a little bit outside of our scope in terms of what we normally cover,
but we all sort of agreed that this was an important important issue can just.
Why is Mike Lewis important to our range and field of study?
Well, I think that when we talk about antidotes to conspirituality as a politics of religious paranoia and grandiosity, we are really good at talking about the benefits of critical thinking, scientific literacy, and developing a radar for cult dynamics.
We talk about civics, democracy, and we try to, especially you, Julian, you've been doing this for years, we try to define something called grounded spirituality.
Yeah.
But it's also worth learning more about, and I think maybe even supporting, how moderate religionists understand and push back against religious extremism in their own communities.
Because red-pilled Catholic followers of Strickland and Burke are just not going to listen to secularists on why they're misguided.
But they may have to listen to those who can appeal to and share their claim on the Catholic identity.
Yeah, you know, one thing I've always said is even myself as an atheist, Christianity and by extension Catholicism are still the waters that we swim in in America.
So even if you don't espouse a particular faith here, the sort of foundations and guidelines by which we operate our society are very Christian in a lot of ways.
And I really appreciated the interview and how Mike is at least trying to be progressive with his values.
Being an atheist does not mean that I'm anti-religion.
I've written about this for years.
I very much appreciate communities that form around religions when they do things like try to be charitable towards others.
And I was raised nominally Catholic, at least.
I received my first Holy Communion, but I didn't get all the way to confirmation.
Okay, so I gotta ask you, are you in the 30% of those who believed in or understood transubstantiation when you were an 8-year-old little boy?
I just learned about that term for this episode, so I'm not even sure.
That's the whole thing because when we're trying to assess Catholic belief, we also have to like interview Catholics about what they think their beliefs are.
And so it's, yeah, there's a lot of distance between what's on the page and what people actually do and what they get in school.
Many atheists have pointed out that they often have a better understanding of the actual religious doctrines than those who claim true belief.
Right, and I knew what the term meant.
I was just kidding about that.
But I mean, growing up, my mother was basically agnostic Catholic.
She found it a little bit more when her mother died, but she still doesn't actually know any of the beliefs.
She just said, believe in God, whatever.
My father was agnostic Russian Orthodox.
When I asked him why he didn't raise me with religion, his immediate response was, because I had too much of it growing up.
So when I bailed on CCD in sixth grade, they didn't argue.
They were like, okay, you don't have to go anymore.
Plus, as you just referenced a moment ago, Julian, about atheists and their study, I have a degree in religion because I find the storytelling aspect and the community building fascinating.
But I think conversations like what you have with Mike is really important, because whether or not I believe in metaphysics doesn't mean there aren't communities out there that do, and we all have to live together and try to understand one another.
So I might disagree.
I do disagree with Mike about the topic of abortion, but I also really appreciate his website's longstanding conviction for welcoming the LGBTQ plus community into the fold.
Yeah, I mean, I support pragmatism in a sense that here we all are and we do have to figure out how to live together.
And I want to underline that I believe I can speak for both of you when I say we all three of us support a woman's right to choose.
We also oppose discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation.
I will speak up as the friendly anti-theist to some extent on the podcast.
To me, I think the most potent antidote to religious bigotry.
is to realize that at its root religious authority and its foundational supernatural claims are as
baseless as anything else. We debunk on the podcast quantum magic, homeopathy, astrology,
but failing that I definitely support people who are trying to bring somewhat progressive values
to those who imagine that these need religious validation.
It's really generous, full-throated, coalition building support Julian. Martin Luther King Jr.,
Cornel West, they're so thankful that that you appreciate them and that you're supporting them.
It's great.
Well, are you channeling them right now?
This is impressive.
I am, actually.
I am.
I'm not doing the voice now.
That's not good.
That wouldn't be good.
Yeah, that wouldn't be good.
Don't get me wrong.
I think that if religious believers and institutions and figureheads find some kind of common cause with progressive politics and they can influence their flock in that direction, that is wonderful.
I do think, though, in countries with separation of church and state, it's very important that political parties don't feel that they have to base their policy platforms on any kind of religious justification.
I also say that what Lewis and his cohort are doing is just smart marketing.
And I don't mean for him in particular, but the church as a whole, because obviously the Catholic Church does not have a great track record in recent decades, especially in America.
You know, some people like to pretend that spirituality is separate from everyday life, and that's just not true.
The church is a business like anything else and every business needs customers.
And just like in the corporate world, I'm much happier when I see a company being inclusive and not spouting hateful rhetoric.
And from everything I've seen, this acceptance seems like it's a part of Lewis's worldview, not just a business building coalition, but actually a spiritual calling.
And I really appreciate that.
But broaden out a little bit.
And I'd say that every church would do better by understanding and embracing the world's diversity
rather than staying confined to archaic and outdated modes of thinking that doesn't represent
what we know of ourselves as a biological animal and what we know of ourselves
as a society that's connected to all the other societies now in the world.
Mike Lewis is a writer and editor based in Maryland.
He is the co-founder and editor of the website Where Peter Is, which seeks to promote the mission and vision of Pope Francis and to provide a response to his reactionary and fundamentalist critics.
Previously, he worked in the publishing industry.
He's married with four kids.
♪ Mike Lewis, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
Let's start in Rome.
Here is the lead from an American magazine AP report from just this November 20th.
Quote, Pope Francis's recent gesture of welcome for transgender Catholics has resonated strongly in this working class seaside town south of Rome, where a community of trans women has found help and hope through a remarkable relationship with the pontiff forged through the darkest times of the pandemic.
Thanks to the local parish priest, these women now make monthly visits to Francis's Wednesday General Audiences, where they're given VIP seats.
On any given day, they receive handouts of medicine, cash, and shampoo.
And when COVID-19 struck, the Vatican bused them into its health facility so they could be vaccinated ahead of most Italians.
So there's a lot going on there.
Working class town, charity and community offered to trans women, including vaccine care during COVID.
Is it fair to say, Mike, that this is the kind of thing that just really breaks the brains of some conservative Catholics?
Yeah, I think that this snapshot of Pope Francis is actually a really good place to start.
One of the things that Pope Francis has emphasized since the very beginning of his papacy has been everyone, everyone, everyone.
Todos, todos, todos.
Everyone is welcome.
He has talked about going out to the periphery in a way that perhaps hasn't been mentioned by popes before.
And by this, he means those who Either feel excluded from the church or who have problems of conscience or lifestyle that may make the church unattractive to them.
I think in the case of these trans women, the news story details how Many of them are former sex workers from Latin America.
Some of them have been victims of abuse, of trafficking.
They live in poverty.
In that article specifically, it talks about one woman who was raised Catholic, had that background.
Her house is filled with pictures of saints and statues.
And so she has this bond with the church.
But formally, she feels that she's outside of it.
And I think that Pope Francis, by emphasizing this outreach, has certainly challenged the U.S.
cultural bubble in conservative Christianity overall, whether Catholic or Mormon or Protestant.
Essentially, a lot of Christians in the U.S.
decided that what they wanted to do was retreat into their own communities, form communities where their children won't be influenced by the outside world.
And I think we are at a point in our history Where many of us who grew up in these more insular communities are beginning to challenge the health of that paradigm.
And there's a conflict within the Catholic Church.
And Pope Francis is clearly calling to open things up.
And there is a reactionary contingent of which Bishop Strickland is a figurehead.
That is certainly pushing back against it.
And he has become something of a folk hero to U.S.
conservative Catholics.
Well, that's who we're talking about today.
And I wanted to start with a little bit on Francis because Bishop Strickland, formerly now of Tyler, Texas, has become, for his followers and critics, a sort of anti-Pope.
So, let's just do a little bit of basic background and bio.
What's the 101 on why he's recently been investigated and removed from office?
I suppose you could say there are the formal reasons and then there are the reasons why he gained the attention of Rome.
Formally speaking, he made some serious errors in administration.
Now, the precise reasons are kept confidential.
Basically, for his benefit.
Essentially, he had an employee review where two bishops appointed by Pope Francis went to Tyler, conducted an investigation, interviewed dozens of people, including Bishop Strickland himself.
That was back in June.
Months passed, deliberations happened behind the scenes, there may have been conversations with him that we're not privy to, and ultimately he was relieved because of failures in administrating the diocese.
That's what we can glean from, at least from the official formal papal statement.
One of the reasons why Strickland was specifically addressed, there could be 30 or 40 other bishops that are just as incompetent as managers across the country, but they aren't drawing this kind of attention to themselves.
In 2018, Bishop Strickland became a public critic of Pope Francis's governance.
This led into the year 2020 with the outbreak of COVID.
Bishop Strickland was outspoken in his promotion of various conspiracy theories.
He was openly anti-vax in opposition to Pope Francis and he would retweet or tweet out statements and sources and links that came from conspiracy theory organizations and figures.
He describes himself as a farm boy raised a hundred miles away from where he eventually became bishop.
What else can you tell us about his background?
Well, he is one of six children raised Catholic in a very, I suppose they describe East Texas as the southern part of Texas in terms of culture, in terms of background.
So a very Baptist, historically anti-Catholic region of East Texas.
His father died when he was young, he lost an older brother as well, and early in his young adulthood, he entered seminary for the Diocese of Dallas.
He was ordained a priest in 1977, and then in the mid-80s, the Vatican decided to split The Diocese of Dallas into two parts, the larger and more populous part being the Diocese of Dallas, and then a portion of the priests and parishes became part of the newly established Diocese of Tyler.
So he was one of the original priests of Tyler.
During his priesthood, he was known as very popular, very friendly.
Everyone knew him as Father Joe.
He worked at the cathedral.
Later on, he was one of the first blogging priests.
He was a very active runner.
So his blog in the 2000s was about the various 5 and 10Ks that he ran, his times, pictures that he took while he was on his run.
Yeah, he was known as the running priest, but he was seen as sort of this friendly country priest.
And by all accounts, he's a very friendly man.
Who knew all of his people, everyone knew him.
He was, because he was a local boy and because it's such a small diocese population-wise, everyone knew him.
So then 2012 rolls around and there is a vacancy in Tyler.
Bishop Strickland, hometown priest, beloved by the people, was named Bishop of Tyler.
The press coverage at the time was everybody's happy for Father Joe.
I guess a lot of people celebrated it.
There are pictures of him with a big goofy smile.
For the first three or four years, I think things went along pretty well.
But then, and this is something that I think journalists could probably do well to dig
into a little bit better, but around 2017 and 2018, the diocese, as many in the US are
are, was facing some financial problems.
He put his trust in an expert.
This expert, I guess, had a clean house mentality, and they wound up laying off almost all of the employees of the diocese.
Through the course of this, they had to settle some lawsuits for Title IX from women who had been unfairly laid off.
There was a bad taste in people's mouths.
Apparently within a year Bishop Strickland had a falling out with some of the people who had coordinated this huge transition which meant the second transition within a year or a year and a half in the diocese.
So people became very concerned with his administration and along the way many of the people who were mentoring him or who were advising him Also happened to be, for lack of a better term, right-wing reactionary Catholics.
This is post-Trump, obviously.
This is Texas.
To the best of my knowledge, Strickland was always a conservative, but I think when the whole Make America Great Again MAGA scene started, he became very interested in that.
And I think a lot of these ideological advisors started influencing him about traditionalist Catholicism.
He began to receive a national profile over espousing these ideas,
even though he was never really he he was a country priest.
He wasn't into the Latin Mass.
He wasn't into the incense or the chant.
But suddenly people who were into these things started advising him, started befriending him.
From what I am told by inside sources, he doesn't write his own speeches or his own addresses or his own pastoral letters.
And his current ghostwriter is a deacon named Keith Fournier who came to Tyler from Richmond in order to support Bishop Strickland
in his ministry.
If you look back at Fournier's past writings, you can see a very close resemblance in terms of being a
culture warrior, in terms of vision for the church in the future,
in terms of how the faith should be taught, how morals should be enforced.
You see this in Fournier's writings.
I think that he may be the strongest influence on Strickland at the moment.
And if I had to guess, other than Strickland's responsibility himself, I think Deacon Fournier probably bears the second highest degree of accountability for Strickland's ultimate removal.
It's kind of an incredible tale of the gradual audience capture and acceleration of certain points of view, which, you know, start in very common places.
I mean, the country priest who grows up in a past era, to be fair, under the administration of Pope John Paul the Great as he calls him, which of course
becomes the template I think probably for his obedience.
And now he is figuring into this broader traditional Catholic and perhaps even is it fair to say
Sedevacantist movement?
I don't think it's necessarily fair to describe him as a Sedevacantist, which for the audience...
Yes, let's do it.
The term Sede Vacantist comes from the Latin Sede meaning seat or chair and Vacante meaning vacant.
Basically, what they are saying is that the seat of Peter is empty, the Pope is invalid.
There is a long-time Sedevacantus movement that started in the early 80s.
They have believed that every Pope since 1958 is invalid.
They believe that the priests and the Mass that 99% of Catholics in the world today Go to is not valid, meaning that the Eucharist is just bread and wine as opposed to the Catholic belief that it becomes the body and blood of Christ.
Right.
They have fringe chapels scattered throughout the country.
Since Pope Francis has become Pope, there's been a large contingent of JP2 Catholics in the U.S., in Canada, who have decided that Pope Francis himself is invalid because he's a heretic.
So they admire Pope Benedict, JP II, and the Vatican II popes, but they think that Pope Francis is the pope who has crossed that line into heresy and has set up, and I'm using words that I see regularly on these blogs and in these podcasts, A counterfeit anti-church and he rules from Rome as a dictatorial anti-pope.
In a recent speech that Strickland delivered in Rome, he opened by saying, I received a letter from a dear friend who is a very holy and thoughtful and brilliant Catholic.
Although this friend wrote this letter to me, I think it is for all of us and I would like to read it to you now.
This letter simply begins, Francis is an expert at producing cowards.
By preaching dialogue and openness and a welcoming spirit, and by highlighting always his own authority, he makes it seem that one who opposes him and what he proposes is an enemy of the church.
And yet is it not the blood of the cowards?
Yet it is not the blood of the cowards that is the seed of the church.
It is the blood of the martyrs.
And Rome has been literally consecrated by the blood of Christians.
As Tertullian wrote, we multiply when you reap us.
The blood of Christians is seed.
Again my friend speaking to me, but I believe to all of us, you cannot, indeed you must not, go to Rome and play nicely.
The Queen of Martyrs has called you, and you cannot parcel out truth in pieces.
After all, were we not told that the truth would set us free, The Synod has gathered cowards in Rome, those who not only refuse to die for our Lord and His Church, but indeed demand that His eternal truths be changed.
And if you play nicely with these, then you mock the martyrs.
He put a passage from the Book of Revelation in there that Seventh-day Adventists use all the time to say that the Pope is the Antichrist.
Well, now you have a Catholic reading a letter that says that Pope Francis is the Antichrist.
When he said that line, he interjected a comment saying, well, I'm not very smart.
Someone will have to explain that to me.
Oh, wow.
Later on.
All right.
I mean, we're going to get into this territory where there is the challenge of being on Facebook too much and not being fully, you know, in control of the content that he is becoming a vector for.
And afterwards he was, uh, you know, he was interviewed by a friendly outlet and he said something to the effect of, well, that's ridiculous.
Of course, I'm not a set of a contest.
I believe that the Pope is valid.
Now he's not explaining why he thinks it's perfectly acceptable to read a letter like this.
I don't know if it was coordinated, but obviously it leaves that Little bit of doubt.
And I don't know if you've observed this in, you know, following the far-right or the alt-right overall, but to say, these weren't his words.
These were the words of his friend.
And look, he didn't even understand it.
Oh, yeah.
It's hard to pinpoint.
I don't think that he is a systematic theologian.
I don't think that his views are based on a school of thought.
I think this is very much social media driven.
Pop culture, reactionary populism.
And it's based on who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
And so obviously this unnamed friend is one of the good guys.
The people who coordinated the conference are the good guys.
Pope Francis, Anybody who supports him, anybody who disagrees with the various moral elements of Catholic teaching that he does, they are enemies.
They are trying to take down the church.
And he seems to have convinced himself that he is a crusader for truth.
By all accounts is not a, at least publicly, he's not a mean, aggressive guy, but He is more than willing to engage in an interview or to relay a message from someone who is an open, outspoken, and angry extremist.
Right now, he is the flavor of the day in the, I guess what you could call, reactionary traditionalist movement.
I don't know if he's led this crusade or he's just the biggest name who's found himself in direct opposition to Pope Francis and Catholics who support him.
Well, he does say repeatedly, I'm not a theologian.
I'm not the sharpest tool in God's toolbox.
I'm not exactly sure about the phrases.
But I do have a few minutes here of him talking to the host of the LifeSite News podcast, a guy named John Henry Weston is the host.
And I want to say that just looking through the archive of episodes, this is an extremely red-pilled Catholic platform.
And I think Strickland presents himself clearly when asked why he is somehow the enlightened leader the Roman Catholic Church needs right now.
So let's take a listen.
I don't know that I have the answer.
I'm mystified that me, you know, a kid from, you know, outside Atlanta, Texas, Why me?
And how me?
But really, having said that, the answer is very clear to why I know this truth.
Because I know Him.
I know Jesus Christ.
And through prayer and It's not because of me at all.
It really isn't.
Part of my prayer at every Mass is, I'm nothing.
You're everything.
And that's the reality.
I don't have any super gift of anything.
I'm not sort of some, you know, special gift.
He is.
And I guess the gift that I have received I want to just say that in introducing Strickland for this interview, Weston quotes from a parish priest in Tyler who talks about how the bishop could be found every morning at 5 a.m.
praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament for 90 minutes before a morning Mass.
And then he does it again before noon mass.
So there's a lot of public prayer.
And just after this same moment in the episode with Weston, he talks about the essential
splendor of the true presence, which you referred to earlier as kind of this dividing line between
Catholics who are.
There's a lot to unpack here.
invested in sacramental reality and those who have lost their way.
He's basically saying I have a direct line to God and I am in communion with Christ.
Is that essential to his followers belief that you know he's the leader for them?
You ask some good questions.
There's a lot to unpack here.
First of all I think as you listen to his voice, as you listen to his tone, that is
how he comes across all the time.
He sounds like a sincere believer.
He sounds like somebody who is willing to lay down his life for Christ.
Actually, he says that openly and on a regular basis.
You know, just as you've spoken about in your podcast so many times, the people who become caught up in movements are sincere.
They believe they're doing the right thing.
The way that they interpret things, they are convinced that it's the truth.
It strikes me, though, that when he says that he is doing what Jesus asked, that his relationship with Jesus is what persuades him that what he's doing is the truth, He seems to have absorbed sort of the me and Jesus, just me, Jesus, and my Bible approach to Christianity, which is inherently Protestant.
Yeah.
George W. Bush spoke about how he would appoint originalist judges who would read the Constitution literally and interpret it in the way that The fathers in the 18th century meant it.
Other justices have had an idea of a living constitution, one that continues to guide us and some things can become interpreted differently as the country expands, as our ethics change, as our approaches to different issues change.
And by having a pope and by having an idea of what Catholics call a living magisterium, Catholic theologians today will refer to authentic development in continuity with tradition.
Right.
So, for example, things like slavery, the way that we approach religious liberty, the way that we approach our interactions with other faiths like Judaism or Buddhism or Islam have clearly changed over time.
Right.
And so the idea, the principle behind why the Catholic Church in the past was Intolerant of religious liberty has changed in light of an increasing understanding of human dignity.
We may have disagreements with other religions but because that principle of treating others with dignity, respecting their consciences, letting people voluntarily choose their faith.
We all see this in this paradigm of God wants us to be free, God wants us to love him freely, and therefore if other people in pursuing God, even though we may not agree with all the doctrines or lack of doctrines that they embrace, we respect that.
Now the traditionalist movement does not see the threat of continuity, that The Church today embraces.
So they would just see a reversal.
They would see that back in the day we believed in a confessional state and today we believe in a society that is tolerant of other religions.
That's a contradiction.
That's not what the Church has believed for centuries and centuries.
It's a form of fundamentalism.
If you look at Bible-based evangelical fundamentalism in the Midwest or the South of the U.S.,
they say the same things about the Bible when debating more progressive Protestants, for
example.
Once again, it's an originalist approach to doctrine.
For Protestants, it could be Bible only.
For Catholics, it's, let's look at these papal documents from 1500 or 1200, or what these theologians had to say about the death penalty, or that sort of thing.
And when they see a contradiction with what the Church presently teaches, They reject it out of hand.
And so this is what we've come up against with Pope Francis.
Because I think conservatives, there was a traditionalist movement back in the 70s and 80s that opposed Vatican II.
But I think conservative Catholic scholars and pundits were able to adapt John Paul II and Benedict XVI so that their views Even though they opposed the death penalty, even though they wanted to fight climate change, they were able to massage it enough to make them look like they subscribe to the platform of the Republican Party.
Pope Francis, when he was first elected, said, I want a poor church for the poor.
And they tried to massage him a little bit for the first year or so, but his different perspective, they couldn't work with it anymore.
It was unavoidable what he was trying to say.
And it's funny because the coverage of certain issues, it's incredible what they cherry pick.
from what he says and how they frame him as, you know, as some sort of Marxist or revolutionary
heretic.
Strickland's entire critique of the Francis papacy is that he believes the church has
has reoriented from what he calls the vertical to the horizontal.
And Strickland suggests that this signifies an unwillingness to look to God directly for the known answers, right?
I guess in matters of objective morality or objective doctrine, Pope Francis hasn't changed anything.
But what he has emphasized is lack of judgment.
He's emphasized the fact that everyone is a sinner.
I mean, we look at traditionalists and the amount of pride, the amount of rudeness, the amount of ridicule.
Especially on social media that we see from this crowd.
That is sinful according to Catholic morality.
But they've shifted this emphasis on just a few issues.
And anything so much as treating someone who's LGBT with respect and dignity and not calling them to repentance in every single conversation is seen as a cop-out.
The fact that on my website that we use the term LGBT, or say the LGBT community, is scorned.
It's shown that we've sold out to the culture.
This approach is not Christian.
And another thing that Pope Francis has chosen to emphasize is, yeah, these things are, okay, all of these things are sins.
And I mean just pridefulness, jealousy, treating your workers unfairly, damaging the environment, and these sexual issues.
But let's be aware that people reach Where they are through their life experiences, through what they've learned, their consciences may not be aligned with the Catholic Church.
What is the Catholic Church really trying to do?
The Catholic Church is trying to bring Christ to others.
A non-Catholic is not going to join the Catholic Church Based on its doctrine that it's illicit to use artificial contraception.
No, no, I don't I don't think that's been a winning point.
No.
I mean, if you look at the statistics, I think something like 90 to 95% of Catholics either disagree with it or don't follow it.
I know some Catholics who do follow, who don't follow this teaching and they say, you know, I know the church is against it, but right now I'm not in this situation where we can afford more kids.
I had postpartum depression with the last one.
We aren't making enough money to support the ones we have.
What Pope Francis is basically saying is, listen to these voices.
Have sympathy for these voices.
To what degree are they culpable for not following this doctrine perfectly?
You look at a couple that, maybe they're a gay couple that's been together for 25 years, they're raising two kids together, and it seems that those who are in Strickland's camp, they want to demand immediate compliance.
This couple must separate.
I don't know what they think they should do with the kids.
Give them to a heterosexual couple to raise or something like that before they will show them common human decency or befriend them.
The only purpose to have a relationship with such a person is to get them out of that lifestyle.
Now, we don't apply that to other sins and other teachings, and that's something that Pope Francis has emphasized.
That's something that priests like Father James Martin have been trying to teach.
When it comes to Father Martin, he's a Jesuit priest in New York who's written a lot of books.
He's known now for his LGBT ministry, which he began in the year 2016.
And Bishop Strickland has condemned the man.
He's criticizing a priest who hasn't crossed doctrinal lines, at least not publicly, who is simply trying to build a bridge of welcome And of dialogue and of listening between the institutional church and the LGBT community.
And it's this intolerance, this desire for purity.
When you look around and you see so much hypocrisy, Especially since 2002 in the Catholic Church itself.
We're suffering this crisis of credibility.
Who in their right mind would want to join an organization that had this huge abuse scandal that revealed that Catholic leaders were covering up the sexual molestation of children and on top of it is filled with judgmental and angry people with ideological agendas.
I mean, it seems baffling, it seems self-defeating, but this is the church that they want to build and they believe that this is the way forward for the Catholic Church, which strikes me as either completely out of touch or rooted in a desire to create a perfect community.
I mean, essentially a cult.
And there are Catholic cults that do follow these models.
There are traditionalist and charismatic groups that enforce purity culture, that enforce strict conformity, that follow leaders of questionable moral character.
And if we're trying to reach out to Catholics, or lapsed Catholics, or former Catholics, or people who are considering Catholicism, but have qualms.
And I'm not saying it's all about joining, but it's about becoming unified with our fellow human beings.
And if they want to join, it's between them and God.
If God leads you or inspires you to come back into the Church, then That's your own conscience.
That's your own journey.
But they seem to think that persuasion and debating and coercing and applying social pressure and being unforgivingly judgmental is how you build a community that's Supposed to be rooted in God's love.
We can add posting to that list as well, because one of the things that Strickland becomes famous for, as you've alluded to already, especially throughout the pandemic, is that his communication strategy really becomes social media oriented.
And you've got this great list of tweets and Facebook posts at the bottom of an article that we'll link to.
What does he start doing?
What are his greatest hits of the pandemic?
He was probably the most outspoken of the U.S.
bishops when the shutdown happened.
He expressed several times that he wasn't going to shut down churches.
He was going to stick to his guns.
For whatever reason, I don't know if it was from pressure from Rome, pressure from his other bishops in Texas, maybe public health officials were going to make it impossible for him to keep them open, but ultimately he relented.
He was of course one of the first few to open up churches.
After the pandemic had started.
I don't think that this was necessarily unique to Tyler, Texas.
This was, we saw this across the South.
We saw this in Texas.
We saw this in Florida.
We saw this in plenty of places.
Michigan, a lot of people were defiant against the mask mandates, against social distancing, and would defiantly break them and meet in large groups.
Which often led to super spreader events and people wound up getting sick and dying.
And during this time, he was sharing conspiracy theories about the globalism that was supposedly behind COVID.
He was Obviously criticizing people like Bill Gates and George Soros, saying that they were behind the COVID pandemic, when it all really took a life of its own on was when the vaccine was being developed.
Right.
The main vaccines that were developed that came out during the COVID pandemic, the Pfizer, Moderna, and the AstraZeneca, We're all developed using a line of cells.
I don't know if it was in the actual drug production, but maybe the testing.
But these cells were derived from a stem cell line that goes all the way back to a fetus who was aborted, I think, in the Netherlands in 1963 or something like that.
This is like the ground zero original sin of Vaccination from a traditionalist Catholic perspective that is focused upon the abortion issue, right?
Exactly.
And the Catholic Church has taken a very nuanced view towards This kind of research towards drugs or vaccines or products that are developed using things, I guess you would say, that are proximate to evil or approximate to sin.
In this case, the Catholic Church has determined, okay, this was one abortion took place in the, you know, years and years ago.
The stem cell line that was derived from it is universally used in this type of research.
It's proven to be very stable.
It becomes unavoidable from a consumer standpoint.
On top of that, there's also the principle of double effect.
I guess it's one of those things where, you know, the trolley car problem or something like that.
Do I directly choose or do I just keep going through?
I think the Catholic Church's approach from a moral theologian standpoint, traditionally, has always been the going through.
Because that act of actively doing the evil and the degree to which you participate in it is something that they consider.
Now here we have a situation where the sin has already happened, but we have the results of that.
Now nothing is going to undo that abortion.
Most of the people who Our benefit or participate in the research.
We're not personally involved, depending on their morality.
Perhaps they would have done it differently if they were in that situation.
Yet here we have this drug.
We have this pandemic that's killing hundreds of thousands, millions of people.
We know that we can transmit this virus very easily, that it's very deadly towards the elderly, especially.
And so the common good of public health, of People being allowed to have the freedom to move around, of keeping our society up and running, allowing, I mean the impact on the poor and the marginalized.
Was was devastating during COVID.
Right.
And so the Vatican said actually they said in 2008 that it would be morally illicit to receive vaccinations that had been developed in this way.
But they had to come up like the canon lawyers had to come up with a rationale.
This is a long process.
It's a very subtle argument, but they work it out.
And it was worked out a decade and a half ago, if not before.
I mean, it was a, it was an open, I would say it went from an open question to a settled question.
Yeah.
It's morally permissible.
And it happens through a process that is similar to, or it's, it's a part of this.
The living magisterium or the authentic development in Continuity with tradition.
And you did open this part of the conversation by saying this might seem trivial to non-Catholics, and I just want to say for non-Catholics who are listening, that yeah, if there is a lot of emotion and existential consideration wrapped up in the abortion issue, then this is something that has to be worked out.
Yeah, and never underestimate Catholic guilt.
Right, right.
It can be huge.
And toss in American Christian purity culture, and it can cause a lot of consternation for people.
Bishop Strickland was Hinting that he didn't want to have anything to do with, quote-unquote, abortion-tainted vaccines.
Right.
Pope Francis came out with another document in 2017, and then another one was put out by the main doctrinal office in the Catholic Church in the year 2021, saying that if you refuse to receive the vaccine, you need to take every single precaution not to transmit it.
Meaning prophylactic measures, wear your mask, stay socially distant from people, basically all of the precautions before the vaccine was available.
As you observed, The anti-vax movement even spurned that.
Right.
Masks are stupid.
You know, you can't transmit it through X, Y, or Z. And then you had all of these conspiracy theories that were being promoted about ivermectin and the various other drugs.
And there's a parallel here too, I think, between Strickland praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament for 90 minutes every morning and forging in his mind a direct relationship with Christ and this sort of natural health attitude that says, I don't need to listen to public health authorities or epidemiologists, I'm going to
go straight to my own intuition with regard to how I'm going to
survive or, you know, not become sick with this virus that may not even exist.
There's a parallel there. And it's interesting because this right here is the Catholic
contribution to the much larger anti-vax QAnon
It's kind of funny because I get the sense, and I don't know if this is your observation as well, but upper middle class young professional parents who send their kids to top schools in Southern California have different reasons for skipping out on the vaccine than, say, a health food nut.
Right.
This group doesn't want impurities in their body.
This group might be doing it for, I don't want my kid to get autism.
Another group might say, let the regular folks handle herd immunity while I benefit from it.
But I don't want, you know, I don't want this stuff in my body.
You know, there are all kinds of of rationales that people will use.
And Yes, you take the issue of abortion and it's radioactive in the traditionalist and conservative Catholic community.
Tie that into everything that they've absorbed from the Christian coalition or from their allegiance with evangelicalism.
And all of those kinds of moral hangups, and you've just got this, this mix.
And also some deep Gothic fears about the meddling of, you know, medical science, going right back, this goes back several hundred years, with the basic sort of, you know, divinely inspired and directed health of the body.
And the ironic thing is, we've always had a populist element In the Catholic Church.
But we've also had this strong institutional element.
And I know that in the late 19th century, When the smallpox vaccine was developed, the Popes at the time would issue edicts mandating in their territory, in the Papal States, that people get the smallpox vaccine.
There were anti-vaxxers back then, but the Pope is not an expert on science.
If you want to go to an expert on doctrine, You go to the Pope.
If the Pope wants information about public health or medicine or science or climate change, he goes to the experts in those fields and he relies on the best expertise.
I mean, this is, I mean, and this is the principle that Pope Francis follows.
People are mad at him for saying that getting the vaccine is an act of love, not only, you know, to protect yourself, but to help, to help prevent you from transmitting it to other people.
People are saying this is terrible.
He's encouraging you should stay out of it.
He's not a scientist.
And I'm like, no, he's not a scientist.
And neither are you.
Right.
He's going to the public health officials in Italy and talking to people around the world and getting the best advice.
It may not be perfect.
Obviously, science continues to grow and expand and learn from its mistakes.
I know that most scientists say that the way we handled the first few weeks of COVID, if we had known better, we might have done it differently.
Right.
But we did the best we could at the time.
And given all of the responses, who was the safest bet to go with?
I went to Vatican City in April of 2022.
Italy had brought back up a lot of the restrictions that had been Lowered in North America because there was another outbreak.
So I had my, my, my fancy, you know, medical grade mask.
Couldn't go into St.
Peter's without my mask.
I needed to, the hotel I stayed in, I needed to have documented proof of my vaccine and my booster.
Right.
Basically what he was doing was he was implementing the best practices of civil society on a question that is not a moral one.
It's a scientific one.
Now, if, Uh, scientists start going into the area of experimental ideas about ethics.
The Pope might say something, but on issues like COVID, on issues like climate change, the best practice for Catholics is to accept the science, accept the scientific consensus, because where else are you going to go?
Some guy on YouTube?
Some guy who got kicked off YouTube?
But one thing that was kind of amazing with Bishop Strickland is he would speak at anti-vax conventions alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
and chemtrail people and quack doctors.
And he was the abortion guy.
They have the one, I guess, discredited scientist who doesn't believe in viruses.
I don't know if you're familiar with him.
I don't know his name, but- Yeah, there's a bunch of them.
You know, they had scientists there who don't believe in viruses.
There was a crazy story that I know was featured in LifeSite News of some woman who previously worked, I think, for Pfizer, and she supposedly looked at the Pfizer vaccine through a microscope and saw sentient nanorobots that looked like octopuses in the vaccine.
And he's speaking on the same stage as these people.
Yeah, he's not Talking about chemtrails, he's not talking about the scientific aspects of whatever they think is going on with the chemicals, but he... This is why you said this is the Catholic contribution to this parade.
Exactly.
Is that he has a doctrinal position on the morality of abortion and he can offer that into this And it's actually really valuable for a subculture that actually relies upon gish galloping from sort of point to point.
Viruses don't exist.
Well, maybe they do, but actually the vaccine is worse.
Well, actually, even the vaccine is made up of aborted tissue.
I mean, it's great for them to have as many angles as possible, actually.
Exactly.
I mean, I don't know how much you've studied what their quote unquote endgame is.
It seems to me that they just don't want people to get vaccinated.
And by hook or by crook, by coercion, by FDA recall, I mean, whatever the reason is, they'll celebrate it as long as one less needle goes into somebody's arm.
And that was the approach that they took with the COVID vaccine.
And then, of course, this becomes a real rallying point for those who oppose Francis.
Plus, I mean, it also would connect this Tradcath coalition to a broader heterodox and contrarian movement, right?
It's a matter of temperament.
It's a matter of approach.
But they're all sort of on the same team with a joint purpose of essentially destroying Pope Francis's reputation.
And destroying his credibility, which in the Catholic Church, if you were tearing down even more credibility than you were in the first place, that's not a good idea from a Catholic perspective.
And I don't, like I said, in a lot of ways, it seems bent on self-destruction or it seems, I mean, you look at people who have kind of aligned themselves with right-wing Catholics, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon's War Room.
He was raised Catholic, right, and he claims to be Catholic when convenient.
His views don't seem to align with anything resembling the Catholic Church as it is today.
He tweeted after Pope Benedict died, sede vacante, so he doesn't believe Francis is the Pope.
I want to wrap up, but I just want to mention that one of the favorite tweets of his that you published was close to my heart because it's Strickland saying, quote, the freedom convoy, he's talking about the occupation of Ottawa, is deeply rooted in the basic values that have built the world we take for granted.
We must be free to make choices for our own lives.
God has given us a tremendous freedom as he created us in his image.
We must respect individual freedom.
And this is where, being Canadian, Knowing this story very well, who's actually running the convoy is where I say, oh, you know, the bishop is a shit poster.
Like, you know, he's talking about an event that was run by Alberta separatists.
Many of them had connections with white supremacist groups.
I'm sure he doesn't know anything about that.
They shut down the city center for weeks.
They basically harassed residents, wound up blocking the infirm, the elderly from accessing services.
The only people who took this natural freedom lovers trucker convoy line were like RFK Jr.
and, you know, QAnon adjacent influencers.
Was he ever fact checked on any of these things?
How did he respond when he got pushback?
You'll see in the responses, and maybe it's because they're the people I follow or the algorithm has decided that these are the people I want to read from.
But, you know, 25 of the first 30 responses will be fact checking.
And, and very rarely does he show any accountability for that whatsoever.
There was a, you know, a tweet that he made where I guess the title or the, the first, the lead of the, of the article he was sharing came up and it described both Biden and Pope Francis as snakes or something like that.
And he actually did say, I didn't mean to say that about the Holy Father.
Now, I guess he didn't say it about.
He's posting!
He's just posting.
He's posting from people he believes, from people who are his friends.
He's bought into the narrative, the general MAGA, QAnon, anti-vax narrative, even though he doesn't understand probably 95% of what they're saying, let alone any of the counterpoints.
I think one of the things that I have come to conclude is that people generally don't Bishop Strickland says that he's put his faith in Jesus.
is alone. They take a stand because they have decided that somebody is trustworthy and they
have put their faith in that person. Bishop Strickland says that he's put his faith in
Jesus. Well, who shaped that?
Finishing up on this issue of who is trusted in leadership, this is a last question and it comes from your lapsed brother in Christ and myself.
And it is that, you know, between these two men, between Francis and Strickland, we have starkly different presentations of the protective father.
And it's a very old division.
Strickland seems hell-bent, whether he's informed or not, what he wants is to protect Catholics from the modern world, from ecumenical alliances, worldly philosophy, from everything that does not conform to his experience of The Blessed Sacrament for 90 minutes every morning, whatever that is.
And I just want to note that we can't actually know what's going on when he's doing that.
It's very private.
But with Francis, like I'm perpetually moved by his efforts, limited as they might be by doctrine and tradition and the politics of whatever happens in Rome.
It seems that he wants to protect not only Catholics, but everyone from climate change, from war, from bigotry.
And so, you know, we'll have you back to give the update on whether Strickland has started his own church or not, but for now, which vision of the Good Shepherd do you think is going to win out amongst the Catholics of the world?
And, you know, when you answer that, is that going to be a matter of faith?
Speaking as a Catholic, but also speaking as an observer.
I think that what we are experiencing in the U.S.
Catholic Church, in terms of the influence of figures like Strickland and the combative and judgmental approach to religion, I think in the United States there's a strong chance that this movement will continue to grow and to influence everyday Catholics on a global level, looking towards the future.
Clearly, I think that Pope Francis is at least beginning to turn the ship in the right direction.
We live in a post-Christendom world.
The idea of a dominant societal Christian view or Catholic view fell apart over the last three or four centuries, and for very good reason.
This is a time for People of faith, and speaking specifically as a Catholic, for people to take stock of what our role in the world really is.
I talked about how Strickland actually has power.
Well, for the most part, the Catholic Church doesn't have temporal power.
I mean, except for the Vatican City State.
You know, that's that's the country that the Pope runs.
He can't dictate policy in Massachusetts or Alberta or Liechtenstein.
But what the church can do is take a seat at the table and approach things realistically.
And one thing that popped into my head is one of the key ideas behind the Christian faith, which is not emphasized nearly enough in our culture wars, is that we are all unconditionally loved by God, and we are to reflect that unconditional love If you're gay, if you're transgender, if you're from Africa, if you're Muslim, if you're disabled, elderly, whoever you are, we, in our faith, are called to reflect that unconditional love.
And Pope Francis' acceptance of people, we talked about the group of transgender women that he's become close to.
He's not preaching doctrine to them.
He is reflecting God's unconditional love to them and it doesn't matter what religion you are for that to change a life.
I mean, the more unconditional love we show to others, the better our world will be.
This doesn't mean that evils aren't happening or that we can't speak out and correct someone when they're wrong or even In terms of authority, take action and remove someone like Bishop Strickland.
But if you look at Strickland's approach, do you see unconditional love?
When you look at the approach of this entire MAGA Catholic movement, does it reflect unconditional love?
Obviously it doesn't.
And you said the word father earlier.
This is my final point.
Is that if we look at Strickland as a father, spiritual father of a small diocese in Texas, Who, granted, he has likely means well, has good intentions.
He prays a lot.
Nice guy.
I'm sure he's positively affected, you know, as a public figure, as Father Joe, many lives.
But what he is not doing is loving his children unconditionally.
He's setting limits.
He's setting barriers.
He's saying, no, you can't come to me.
We aren't going to welcome you into this church unless you do these five other things first.
How many people's lives have been scarred or traumatized by well-meaning parents who did not show them Unconditional love and I think Pope Francis who's far from perfect.
I've criticized him harshly on how he's handled Certain abuse cases and and priests who have who've done wrong and actually for three years.
I was clamoring that he removed Bishop Strickland but one thing that I have to say is that his example is one of unconditional love he has been willing to meet with people and his encounters with them, just that openness.
Yeah, they might not become Catholic, but ultimately, if someone becomes Catholic for ideological reasons and still carrying the prejudices and the limited worldview, how is that better than somebody who has had an encounter with somebody who has shown openness and love to them and a desire to listen to them?
We have this saying, which I'm sure you've heard, it's a fallen world.
Things fall apart.
The next Pope could be totally different.
But my faith has been enhanced by what Pope Francis has taught and demonstrated.
Speaking as a Catholic, it's a matter of faith that truth and love will prevail.
Mike Lewis, peace be with you.
And with your spirit.
Thank you so much for spending this time.
Really great portrait of Bishop Strickland and a church in flux, and I hope to catch up with you in the future.
Thank you very much.
It was an honor to be here.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
We'll see you here next week on the main feed, or maybe we'll see you over on Patreon, where there are a lot of discussions that our patrons really enjoy having.
